Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [178]
In this way the professional career of one author during and after the rise, slackening and fall of governments of the hard-line right in the west may throw light on the wider intellectual history of the ‘free world’ in the second half of the twentieth century, that is to say on the rise of the new generations of educated elites since the 1960s, brought up in the spirit of rebellion, even when they were soon to be ‘co-opted’ by (as the phrase then went), or co-opt themselves into the ‘Establishment’. That is not to overestimate the significance of reading these authors. Some were merely badges of temporary political or ideological fashion. For instance, in the years of the great student revolts of the late sixties the writings of the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse were displayed in every university bookshop of the western world – at least I saw them on the East and West coasts of the USA, in Paris, Stockholm, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. (Marcuse himself, a tanned outdoor type who might have been a retired ski instructor, did not look the part when I met him in the house of friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time.) Yet within a few years his writings had returned to the underworld in which aspiring Ph.D. candidates desperately seek thesis subjects.
Whether the authors who thus became political badges in a country were aware of what was happening to their names was largely irrelevant. There are countries in which I did not even know I had readers until I discovered, as on visiting South Korea in 1987, that five of my titles were in print in (pirated) local translations. But for an Iranian friend at the New School, I would not know at all that one Ali-Akbar Mehdian, not otherwise known, had translated and published The Age of Revolution in Tehran in the spring of 1995 adding ‘Europe’ to 1789–1848, ‘probably to be able to get permission for publication’. In Brazil and to a lesser extent in Argentina, countries I knew and where I had friends, I had a shrewd idea of how such names could become familiar, though, until much later, not of the extent of this potential readership.
This takes a Marxist autobiographer into the welcome territory of technology and culture, namely the explosion of photocopiers that accompanied the enormous expansion of higher education in the West since the 1960s. This gave the new masses of teachers and students access, mostly unpaid, to fiendishly expensive imported academic texts otherwise far beyond their modest budgets and the sparse resources of their libraries. It was the Buenos Aires office of my admirable Spanish publisher, Gonzalo Ponton of Critica, which consequently guessed that there was scope for a special local edition of my work, and I discovered the extent of my youthful readership, or at least of those who had a positive reaction to my name, on a 1998 visit to Buenos Aires to promote it. Conversely, it was the systematic absence of such devices in the communist world that long limited its dissident literature to what could be laboriously typed and copied with carbon paper, or learned by heart.
No doubt there are authors – I am plainly not among them – who may trace the intellectual dimensions of the decline and collapse of communism and its consequences in a similar manner, through the fortunes of their works. It is obviously far harder to do so for two reasons.